The jury is still out as to whether mobile TV will be the next big thing or a gust of hot air, and what form it will take. Philips Semiconductors is predicting that within a decade the majority of its chips will go into mobile phones rather than into conventional television sets, although you get the feeling they may be eagerly pushing what they want to happen – more people own mobiles than own TVs.
A few issues are brought up – Philips is keen to develop “a global digital TV feature that enables a user to tune into a television anywhere in the world”, and also an intelligent digital signal processor (DSP) that will enable consumers to easily transfer content from TVs and set-top boxes to phones, reformatting the information to fit on the smaller device. At least their aiming to keep the device open…
In relation to this, Tom Gordon has raised the issue of advertising on mobile TV. His issue is that he doesn’t want to pay for it, although I’m fairly sure the service Philips is talking about won’t be transfered over the mobile network anyway, so won’t incur data charges. It is a valid point though, if consumers are paying premium for a service they won’t want to see ads – not unless the ads are entertaining in their own right…
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